[ga] Re: On Its Way: One of the Biggest Changes to the Internet

[Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>  Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote 
> > IDN names in and of themselves do pose a risk of increased buffer
> > overrun issues - code will be seeing longer names than has
> > frequently been the case.
> I doubt it. The maximum length for names in the DNS has been fixed a
> long time ago and is well-known, 255 bytes ...
It isn't those sizes that I'm talking about.

Rather it is that the ASCII names we use today tend to have an average 
length that is probably on the order of 6 to 12 bytes per label.
But with IDN's the encoded form of names will tend to be longer to 
accomodate both the IDN prefix as well as the actual encoded name.
There has been considerable concern that for some languages (if I 
remember right these are some of the southeast Asian languages and 
perhaps also Arabic) the encodings may run into the 63 octet per label 
limit.
There has been some emotional anger over this as it has been perceived 
as yet another form of intentional western European/American hegemony 
over the net - On average western languages tend to fare better under 
IDN (as measured by byte expansion) than some "southern" languages.

> You mean you don't use traceroute -n and whois? Shame on you :-)
I often use Scapy.

What I really want is 
http://www.cavebear.com/archive/fpcp/fpcp-sept-19-2000.html
> This was a privilege only for english-speaking engineers. With IDN,
> the playing field is more level.
'cept that for those of us who stare too frequently at packet traces 
decoding with the eyeballs will probably long remain the norm.  Is 
anybody building an IDN module for Wireshark?
                --karl--